Office interactions are definitely an important way to foster relationships between coworkers, establish and maintain a corporate culture, and foster creative thinking. This is particularly relevant when a company onboards new employees. However, new technologies, such as the wide-spread use of high-quality video meeting platforms, have enabled us to replace the in-person interactions to some extent and have made most of us more efficient and organized at times. While I don’t envision a future business organization that lacks an office environment entirely, I believe now that everyone has been forced to learn how to get things done in a virtual environment, and that biotechs will adopt a hybrid model of in-person and virtual interactions.

“The biggest thing that is really happening in the biotech industry…there is a new rich source of drugs. There is a goldmine, called mRNA, that some diggers have been digging for 30 years, finding a very small part of it,” said Yochi Slonim​, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Anima Biotech, which is advancing ‘Translation Control Therapeutics,’ the first and only platform for the discovery of small molecule drugs that control mRNA translation.

Immuneering Corp., a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that uses computational technology for drug discovery, completed a $62 million Series B round. Cormorant Asset Management led the financing, which included participation from Surveyor Capital, Rock Springs Capital, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Perceptive Advisors and LYFE Capital.

The review received financial support from Avadel Pharmaceuticals, which recently filed a new drug application  with the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for a once-nightly formulation of sodium oxybate. Sodium oxybate is currently available with twice-nightly dosing from Jazz Pharmaceuticals under the brand name Xyrem. Jazz recently received FDA approval for narcolepsy drug Xywav (calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium oxybates), which has 92% less sodium content than Xyrem.

Immuneering Corp., a bioinformatics specialist that has for years helped big companies like Teva Pharmaceutical Ltd. and Bristol Myers Squibb Co. better understand their own medicines, has landed $62 million in an oversubscribed series B financing that will help it leverage lessons learned in that journey to build out its own pipeline, starting with IMM-1-104, a dual inhibitor of MEK and a related target.

Biotech Clene Nanomedicine has gone public with a mission to use nanotherapeutics that will use gold to treat devastating neurological diseasesincluding Parkinson’s disease.

With crossover investors lining up to participate, biotechs Immuneering and Terns each raised…